Category Archives: What used to be called science

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The antismokers don’t care about health. They make vicious attacks on smokers and vapers and are trying to ban vaping (so far, they’ve succeeded in Australia, land of the most gullible politicians on the planet). They only care about control and money.

The tax take from the remaining villified smokers is immense. Some of it pays the antismoker wages. Neither they, nor the politicians, want you to give up smoking or switch to vaping. They just enjoy punishing you for it and charging you for the privilege of being a hated pariah.

Really, they have tried to claim that breathing steam is even more harmful than breathing smoke. The claims made about smoking causing everything from death to dandruff passed the absurdity horizon long ago. The claims of harm from vaping started inside that horizon and are well on the way to the stupidity singularity. Don’t for a moment imagine that any of this is being done for your benefit. It’s being done for theirs. You don’t matter at all.

Climatologists know the climate changes all the time. They’ve been at that scam for many years. When the climate was cooling in the seventies, we were warned about a coming ice age unless we cut our carbon emissions. Now the climate is warming up a bit, the planet will turn into Venus unless we cut our carbon emissions. Oh, and of course, we have to give them lots of money for their pet projects in order to save the world. People fall for this shit in droves. It’s why religion does so well – people just love a good Armageddon story. Especially when they believe they will be saved and we horrible proles will all die.

Now we have ‘gender fluidity’, a step on the way to gender neutrality all round. The medics are cashing in, as usual, using terms like ‘assigned female/male at birth’ rather than sticking to biological facts. Eight-year-olds are being targeted for ‘gender reassignment’ and why? Because it’s good for them? Hahahaha!

Because it makes money for those pushing this nonsense and, deeper, it furthers the Marxist equality agenda which is, of course, a total control agenda. You don’t even get to decide whether you are male or female. The State decides for you.

Soon babies will be surgically neutered at birth and assigned a gender when the State decides they have reached adulthood – and the way things are going that’ll be when you are about 30. Until then you will be neuter. There can be no sex discrimination if you don’t have one. It’s for your own good and you will be amazed at how many people will believe that.

Currently we have Antifa and the KKK in open war on the streets of America. Personally I’d tell the police to stay out of the way and let them wipe each other out. Both claim to know the best way to run American society and both would create a police state – just with different targets. America has experienced McCarthyism and I bet most people don’t want it back.

None of these groups care about you. The people don’t matter at all. They just want to be in control and they want you to pay for it.

Governments do not serve the people any more. Anywhere. In some places, they never did but at least they were open about it. Now there is no government anywhere that exists for any other reason than to control their people and take money from them.

One day I will be diagnosed with something that will kill me. Or maybe not, maybe I’ll be flattened by a bus or a meteor or blown up by a peaceful religion or stabbed to death in the name of a god of love. But, hopefully, I’ll have a diagnosis telling me I have weeks or months to live.

You will not get me into a hospital. I will smoke everything I can find and drink so much I’d be dead three days before even I noticed. There’ll be no need to embalm me, my body will last longer than Babylonian pickles. I will try class A drugs if I can get hold of any. I never have yet.

If I am told I am in my last months I am going to try everything I can in those months. I will not be tied down in a hospital with my tobacco placed just out of reach because ‘it’s bad for me’. That is beyond cruel. That is actually evil.

It has reached the stage where if anyone says ‘it’s for your benefit’ I automatically look for how they will benefit.

Today it is possible to be globally connected within a narrow bubble-like mindset. A recent departure from Google’s workplace has this take on it. (h/t @RooBeeDoo1 on Twitter).

In the days before widespread internet, we all knew one or two who believed the moon landings were faked, that the new Ice Age was imminent (caused by rising CO2, incidentally), who believed Russia was behind everything bad that happened and that the Earth is flat.

I never met anyone who believed the Earth is flat but all the others, yes. They were harmless. They were entitled to their opinions of course, nobody would force them to change their minds and mostly, the ideas they had were at least entertaining. A diversion from football in the pub chatter.

Now, those ideas are dangerous. All those individual tinfoil hatters have formed, across the Internet, into large groups. Mostly composed of idiots manipulated by a few smart ones with an agenda, they have formed an army of Pub Nutters and they have assumed quasi-religious status.

I recently tried to talk to a few Climatologists on Twitter. They had reached the point where they claimed anyone who does not believe in climate change is an idiot. I interjected at that point, suggesting that the opposite of ‘believer’ is ‘heretic’.

The Cult of the Green God did not approve of the terminology. I said I wasn’t in this fight, they said the only way I could not be in this fight was if I had another planet to go to. More than once in recent years I have wished for just that.

So, the summary is, if I don’t join the ranks of Believers in Climate Change, the Green God will visit Armageddon on us all.

And still they object to this being called a religion.

I gave up when someone pointed me to the ‘facts’ presented by the IPCC. The argument had gone full circle and it was time to step off. It had reached the point in religious arguments where someone says ‘It’s in the Bible/Quran/Torah therefore it is unquestionable.’ You must believe because It Is Written. Not a religion? Really?

The IPCC depends for its funding on the existence of man-made climate change. If they were faced with proof that we have nothing to do with it, that it’s just the same old climate change the planet has always had, the IPCC would all be out of a job. The same is true of many Climatologists now – they have moved from benignly watching it get warmer and cooler to being utterly dependent on man-made chemical death for funding. Admit we aren’t actually responsible and they go back to tapping the barometer and noting the readings. So, would they say ‘Okay, we’ll all pack up’ or would they set their drones to silence the dissent? Give it a little thought, if you need to.

I was presented with arguments including a conflation with being a gravity denier. Gravity is self-evidently real and needs no proof. As someone who was once stuck beneath a heavy rhubarb and who has fallen off a great many things, I am assured of the reality of gravity. The reality of one thing does not prove the reality of another thing. Anyone with the most basic understanding of science would realise that.

Climate heretics are compared to ‘flat-earthers’. Refusal to believe one thing does not automatically indicate belief in another thing. I do not believe in God. That does not mean I worship Satan. Anyone with the most basic understanding of science would realise that.

I don’t believe in Satan either. I have seen and experienced things I cannot prove but I have not seen evidence of any God or Satan in charge of those things. I’ll keep my own counsel on those things until I have solid evidence for them, I get enough derisory comments from those art students who think they know about science as it is. That’s actual science by the way – I don’t want you to ‘believe’, I want to show you data that supports what I say. I do not yet have that data so I keep quiet about it.

As for flat earthers, show me pictures of the edge of the world, explain the lunar eclipse and time zones and seasons and we’ll talk. Until then, I’ll stick with the oblate spheroid with a tilted axis theory. It works for me.

I do not, and will not, simply ‘believe’ anything. There are things I don’t care about enough to investigate myself and many things I’d like to delve deeper into but don’t have time. Just telling me ‘it’s true, believe it or you’ll be damned’ gets you classified as a religion and we’re done. You have not won the argument. I have simply withdrawn from the fray and will leave you to your beliefs. You win the argument when you convince me you’re right and ‘Believe!’ will never do that.

Another thing that makes me give up on you as a waste of arguing breath is ‘the science is settled’ and ‘there is no meaningful debate to be had’. Those statements do not belong to science. They belong to religion. Once you have writings that nobody is allowed to question, you are a religion. Science has no unquestionable data. None. Not even gravity.

Oh we know gravity is there but we still don’t have a definite mechanism for it. Gravitons? Electromagnetics? Angels on our shoulders holding us down? Even something as self-evident as gravity leaves Science with plenty to argue about. Science is never settled.

If a subject area is completely explained and nobody can refute it, then it’s done and we move on to the next. This is not true of… anything yet. Science once had the atom as the smallest indivisible particle of matter. Well that soon changed, and the particles we know about now are still being investigated. They might turn out to be made of smaller bits. Nothing and nobody is science has yet managed to escape debate. Not even Einstein.

You say your science is unquestionable, you are claiming to be smarter than Einstein. I don’t claim to be that smart and I have the hair. Yeah, I should get to a barber before I start looking like Gandalf… but I digress.

We have an army of Green God Cultists predicting Armageddon unless we protect the environment by mining neodymium for magnets to put into vast steel windmills with miles of copper wire inside to protect the environment from industrialisation… yeah, sounds rather like starting three major religions based on the invisible voice that told Abraham to cut the end of his knob off then kill his son. Sorry, religion, but that is how it looks from the outside.

Actually that’s unfair. Most religions don’t advocate doing this to the planet in order to save it. That’s just for the windmill magnets, we won’t go into all that steel and copper wire production, nor the diesel used by the transport and maintenance trucks, and let’s not mention the hundreds of tons of concrete under each and every oversized lawn ornament pretending to save the environment out there…

Climatology is a religion but it’s a religion with a purpose.The dopes who believe in it won’t see that and they’ll laugh it off and call me heretic – or rather the modern variant, ‘denier’. They’ll call me a flat earther and a gravity denier and an idiot while they march to their doom. I have no problem with any of that. You march on, folks. I’ll wait here with beer and a bacon sandwich and watch you march away.

The insularnet is working exceptionally well. The thing we thought brings us all together is the thing that most effectively separates us into insular groups.The Climatologists have no truck with Population Control and no interest in Immigration Insanity and will distance themselves from the Anti-Sex League who will not mingle with Health Police nor with Political Correctness…

…but they, and more, are all facets of one thing. Facets kept separate, specific, isolated on the global net and easily controlled. If they saw the whole thing they’d refuse to take part. Well, a few jackboot-lovers would still take part but mostly, no. You know, the Righteous have learned a lot from their repeated slapdowns over the centuries. This time they intend full control by a series of backdoors. They hope to open them all at once, before any one group realises what is happening.

I’m not going to say any more at this stage. I want you all to break your own bubbles and see who’s been blowing them. Hint: It’s not lizard people. It’s humans. Not very nice humans but they don’t have scales and rarely eat insects.

I have sometimes wondered if Rolf Harris was brought down not because of some insidious political agenda but because of one line he kept repeating. A line that had to be removed from broadcast, a line that might get people to think things they should not be thinking. A line based on an incomplete picture made of a few brush strokes with the rest yet to fit in.

They showed volunteers a series of images, just symbols, but some symbols gave them an electric shock when displayed. The volunteers soon learned to anticipate the shock when the symbol appeared. So far, so Pavlovian. Nothing contentious there.

So now they have a group with a ‘learned fear response’. This, they seem to believe, is a bad thing. It’s the response that stops you poking your finger into a flame a second time. The response that makes you steer well clear of tigers and other things that might eat you. Yet, to these scientists, being afraid of something that hurts is a bad thing.

They then showed the volunteers the same symbols but without the electric shocks and with reassurances that ‘all is well’, The smokers tended to flinch at the symbols anyway, despite the reassurances.

Now, from this they conclude that smoking is bad because smokers don’t just accept the reassurances. Smoking, they say, inhibits your ability to suppress a fear response.

Hypothetical stiuation – some bearded loony is running at you with a machete shouting ‘Allahu akbar but it’s okay, I’m from the religion of peace’. Is it better to suppress your fear response because of reassuring words, or is if better to run like buggery and let the idiot who believes the words get sliced into halal bacon?

I’m a smoker. I’ll hang on to my learned fear response, thank you very much.

The ‘fear response’ is not the same thing as PTSD. That’s where they are making their fundamental error. PTSD needs a cure. It’s debilitating. The fear response does not need a cure. It’s a normal and natural part of being a human. In fact, any animal. Suppressing the fear response means developing people who will stick their finger in the flame a second time and who will try to cuddle tigers.

I seem to recall reading about a condition – might be considered the opposite of PTSD – where people have no ability to feel fear and do not learn from being hurt. That’s a pretty dangerous condition to have. Should we all aspire to be so fearless that we will walk back into a burning house because we think we’ve left the gas on?

A big confounder in this whole experiment is that smokers have a ‘fear response’ to the entire medical profession that has been drummed into us over decades. We know they hate us – it’s not paranoia, they are in the news every day delighting in new ways to make our lives miserable. So when a doctor says ‘Now this time we won’t electrocute you’, the smoker is far less likely to believe it. Basically, medical profession, we don’t trust you, and you made that happen.

The nonsmoker has no such conditioned response. They don’t take their septic finger to the doctor knowing they will be nagged about how smoking causes septic fingers and be told a lot of lies about how they have to give up smoking or the antibiotics won’t work. The smoker forced to interact with the medical world now does so from an initial position of anxiety that is caused not by smoking, but by the incessant nagging.

The article goes on to bemoan how PTSD sufferers smoke much more than us laid back hippie layabout smokers, and calls for ‘interventions’ to stop them. Interventions to stop anyone in a job such as the military, fire service or police from smoking in case their smoking triggers PTSD.

Seriously.

They are claiming smoking causes PTSD. Not attending a crime scene where the walls are decorated with blood and three sets of intestines are tastefully arranged into a semblance of a Christmas tree. No, it’s smoking that gives you PTSD. Not combing through a burning building, knowing it might collapse at any moment just as you come face to face with a charred corpse. Not cowering under heavy shellfire and watching your best mate blown into a thousand pieces right in front of you. No, it’s the smoking we have to deal with.

Seriously. They want to stop soldiers smoking because that’s the biggest danger they face. They want to stop police officers smoking becasue being stabbed by a loony is not so bad, really. The best one is still the firemen. The ones who routinely venture into clouds of choking smoke and flame are not allowed to burn half a gram of leaves and inhale.

This piece of research clearly had the conclusion ‘smoking is bad’ prewritten. It does nothing to advance any kind of treatment for PTSD or anything else. The only thing it advances is the antismoking agenda. Soon you will not be allowed to join the police, military or fire brigade if you smoke.

As the experiment has shown, only those whose natural fear response can be easily overridden will be allowed into those professions. They are the ones who will take unnecessary risks that will put themselves and their colleagues in danger. The smoker who says ‘Whoa, hang on, if we do that we’ll probably die’ is to be banned from the professions altogether.

Military, fire service, police. Three professions where the alleged dangers of smoking are utterly trivial when set against the dangers they face every day. Yet here we have a piece of ‘research’ designed to eliminate smoking from those professions.

It still makes me laugh to see companies with signs saying ‘This company operates a no smoking policy’. No, you don’t. No company operates such a policy because no company has any choice in the matter. Every company, every operator of every workplace and every place open to the public is obliged to prevent smoking on the premises. If they fail to comply they will be fined.

There is no choice. No amount of smug signs saying ‘we are making this rule’ changes that fact. You might as well put up signs saying ‘we obey’ because that is what you are really doing.

Hiding from that fact only emboldens the Health Nazis. They see such compliance as weakness and they know they have not reached any boundary yet. In fact there’s no sign of any such boundary. I suppose, denied the old fashioned persecution of anyone non-white, gay or otherwise different, the bigots out there have to have someone to hate and the Health Nazis have a target for them. Smokers.

They have more targets too. The overweight. Anyone putting salt on their food or swigging a can of chemical fizz. All lined up for when the last smoker has been dealt with.

“We want to address this. Our vision is nothing less than to create a smoke-free generation.”

That’s a quote from Steve Brine, whose surname is going to get him into trouble with the Salties in the future. They want a salt-free world, Steve. No more brine.

But look closely at those words –

“…Our vision is nothing less than to create a smoke-free generation.”

Ah, the new Aryan race. Moulded along lines directed by those who consider themselves lords over all. And to think, they object to being called Nazis.

This ‘smoke-free’ generation are not going to be asked if they want to play along and be part of Briny Steve’s ashtray-free Utopia. Oh no. That generation will be created by the Salty Fuhrer and his coven of We Know Best.

You won’t have the choice, kids, and you’ll be so proud that you have no choice that you will crow about your non-smoking even though you will never get to try it. You will not be allowed to try it and you will obey.

Oh I know there are antismokers out there thinking ‘Excellent. No more smokers’. They don’t see it, do they? Once you are obedient there is no end to it. No salt. Obey. No meat. Obey. No milk. Obey. No booze. Obey. No socialising without State supervision. Obey.

Oh I know, you’re thinking ‘Well I don’t smoke but they won’t make me give up meat’. They won’t make me give up smoking either. It’s not for us. It’s for their Aryan generation of your kids and grandkids and then on forever. The obedient drones they want to create. You want that as your family legacy? We’ll all be reviled as the filthy ancestors who ate burgers, swilled beer and drooled over meat pies with salty chips. Our headstones will be smashed to rubble to pave the pure streets of Obedience Utopia.

Sure, we’ll be dead, why should we care? Why should we care that our descendants will be drones for the elite (who, incidentally, won’t be giving up anything)? Why should we care if the Earth turns into a planet of slaves to be worked and culled and occasionally harvested for the entertainment of a few utter arseholes? Why should we care that Mount Olympus will be staffed by human gods in the future? Why should we care that our children’s children will live their lives in terror of saying a word out of place and ending up ‘on the farm’?

As fertiliser, not driving a tractor.

Why should we care that our great-grandchildren will watch each other constantly, hoping for that buzz of reward when they hand in a wrongthink criminal and get a pat on the head for it?

Ah, maybe I’m exaggerating – but look around. How much of it is in place already? We have ‘bacon crime’ as a real imprisonable offence. Really, we don’t have far to go.

Smoker persecution was just the start. It soon moved on to other things. Smoker eradication is, likewise, just the start. This smoke free generation will be an obedient, choice free generation. They will not smoke. Not because they don’t want to, because they have been told not to and they will obey. Just like those businesses who pretend that being smoke free is their choice, that generation will pretend it’s their choice too. It won’t be. They will not smoke, or drink, or ever taste bacon or beef or chicken, because it will not be allowed. They will be conditioned to believe it was their choice. Just like those businesses with their no smoking policies.

It’s better to believe you chose that path than to accept you were forced onto it, for many people. Not for me. I will not accept force but then school wasn’t a conditioning factory when I was there. They taught us how to think, not what to think. We are no use to the Briny Steves of the world, they are waiting for us to die and, in the meantime, silencing us with political correctness and poofterphobia and dynamitewaistcoatophobia and racism and all the other bollocks. None of it is real for pretty much all of us but their upcoming proto-Aryans believe every word. Especially the made up words. Oh and the suckers who currently enjoy ‘protected status’? Oh you are going to have a really shitty time, very soon.

In the future your grandkids will not smoke and they will convince themselves it’s because they don’t want to. I am not promoting smoking here, I am promoting choice. The choice to not smoke is as valid as the choice to smoke. When you don’t have the choice then you are nothing more than an obedient drone.

Is that what you see for your family’s future?

The vapers will soon point out that the UK Health Nazis have now decided to allow vaping to help with cutting down on smokers. Yeah, don’t get too cheery about it guys. You have not had a reprieve, you have had a stay of execution.

First of all, I finally got ‘Blackjack’ through every technical hitch CreateSpace could throw at me. The page isn’t fully built but it has begun. The Kindle and Smashwords eBook versions have been up for a while. The eBook is also through Smashwords’ filter now and will be appearing on Barnes and Noble, Kobo etc very soon. If you don’t want a Kindle format one, Smashwords has it in almost any format you could possibly want. That goes for all the previous books too.

Okay. So, have I calmed down a bit after last night’s rant? Not at all. I am more furious than ever. Not only have I remembered that it is in fact eleven years of exile for us here in Scotland, not a mere ten that the English are moaning about, but something Roobeedoo posted made me think.

We’re all banging on about pub closures. What about all that taxi income? Long after the buses have stopped running we often needed a taxi to get home after a night of drinking. If it’s a long way and after midnight that’s a big fare. More than eleven years ago it cost me about £30 to get home from a boozy night in Aberdeen (not quite, a mate of mine got dropped off halfway and paid his share) but that compares with about £3 back then if the buses ran that late. I wonder what it would cost now?

Of course I’ll never find out. I’m not going drinking in Aberdeen because half the pubs I liked are gone and the ones that are left have all banned smokers. There’s no justification for spending on a large taxi fare just to have a shitty evening standing around outside in the rain. I could do that at home. At home, I can smoke inside.

The taxis suffered from the loss of pubs caused by the smoking ban too. I expect those late night shops selling mysterious meat from the ‘kebab’ – a strange animal with no internal organs – suffered also. Now I come to think of it, there do seem to be fewer of those shops than there used to be. I wonder if there are any figures on those things? How many of the late night takeaways, of all kinds, now close at 10?

The media stayed silent on the ban or ran more propaganda from the Dreadful Arnott on how great it was. They kept that tone until now.

In Australia, the automatic respect expected by dickheads like Simon Chapman is no more. That one is more about vaping, which is banned in Australia because it interferes with the tax funding that pays for dickheads like Simon Chapman.

It’s now being recognised that it was the smoking ban that killed pubs. Not the economic downturn, not the ‘temporary loss in sales ‘. The earlier bans in Scotland and Ireland showed the lie of the ‘economic downturn’ story.

It’s all been based on lies. Well over ten years of lies and it has taken until now for it to even start to come out. But once it starts, well, there’s likely to be no way to stop it.

When I left mainstream science and went solo, it was already more money-driven than knowledge-driven. Promotions went to those who had big grants even if the research quality was based on ‘give the funders the answer they want and they’ll fund more’. It wasn’t like that when I started. It’s never been like that for me. That’s why I’ll never be rich.

The cracks in the target-driven, money-oriented corruption of what used to be called ‘science’ are widening. Those cracks will swallow a lot of the utter nonsense out there now, including, eventually, the smoking ban and all its Puritan vile control freaks. It’s all going to fall down just like it has every time they’ve tried this in the past.

It has been some time since I last posted fiction (excluding all references to the Daily Mail). This one is a first draft. It might change, it might not, it depends whether I still like it tomorrow. One day though it will be in a collection.

It is fiction. Purely made up with no suggestion that it might be even remotely connected to reality. It was written in a few hours tonight and is not intended to be take seriously.

I haven’t mentioned to Raven that I have had a large plastic raven flying in my house since last October. Synchronicity could raise its head here.

Anyway. To the story. Remember, it’s fiction. I just made it up. It’s probably not real.

Keep the tinfoil handy, just in case.

The Macbeth Trio

“Scrofula!” Doc Armitage banged the table. “That’s the next one.”

Doctor West pursed his lips. Turning to Doctor Smythe, he twirled his index finger beside his head.

“I’m serious.” Armitage rested his hands on the table and leaned forward. “It’s a not-so-deadly form of tuberculosis and we did that one a few years back. So we already have a vaccine that will probably work.” He straightened. “We can use the variant, Mycobacterium scrofulaceum, to claim we have to develop a new vaccine and even if we do have to, it’ll be a piece of piss.”

Smythe rubbed his finger alongside his nose. “I like it. We’re running out of diseases to make vaccines for. This one is rare but we can work with it.”

“Okay.” West steepled his fingers. “Let’s, for the moment, assume you both aren’t totally bonkers.” He held up his hand to forestall Armitage’s protests. “It’s a long shot, but let’s assume it anyway. How the hell do we get the population scared of a disease none of them have even heard of?”

“No problem.” Armitage folded his arms. “It’s related to tuberculosis, often caused by the same bacterium. We blame it on the immigrants, as usual, and show pictures of the few immunocompromised patients who have had it fairly recently.”

“Of course.” West rubbed his temples. “It’s starting to sound good, or maybe I’m just going as crazy as you two.” He looked up. “Same procedure?”

“Yes indeed.” Armitage nodded. “We start up with stats showing this long forgotten disease has begun to make a resurgence. We use percentages so nobody catches on that our four cases became six to give us a 50% increase. Like we did with necrotising fasciitis. Then we start talking about the possibility of 100 new cases in the next century and as with mad cow disease, hardly anyone will notice that’s one case a year.”

“There’s one thing though.” West took a deep breath. “People don’t know scrofula. They’ll look it up. They’ll find out how rare it is. We don’t have the control we had with our own inventions – BSE and necrotising fasciitis and AIDS and so on. They’ll see through this one fast.”

“You’re right.” Smythe tapped his pen on his notepad. “We’ll need some ground work first. Edit Wikipedia and lock it with our version, get our own sites written and up to the top of every search. Get the official NHS and other medical sites on board too. We can afford it. We just need to get our versions in before we mention scrofula to the public. Then when they look it up, they’ll see what we want them to see.”

West shook his head. “We can’t edit every medical textbook.”

“Nobody reads the print ones any more anyway.” Armitage grinned. “And you’re wrong, you know. Most of those books are online or available as eBooks and we can edit them easily. They’ll even update the ones already downloaded onto every device out there. Let the print books carry the truth under a layer of dust. We can edit history and nobody will notice.”

West sat in silence for long minutes. He started to speak a few times but lapsed into thought again. The other two watched him, silent too. West was the one with the final say on this idea.

“It can work.” West said.

Smythe and Armitage high-fived each other.

“Okay.” West reached for the coffee pot and refilled his cup. “This one is going to take a lot of setting up. Smythe, get started on those disinformation sites right away. Armitage, start getting your lab ready for the volunteers. We say nothing about this outside this room until all mention of scrofula on the web is ours. Okay?”

Both nodded assent. Smythe scribbled notes on his pad.

“Then we claim scrofula is on the rise and as before, we blame it on immigrants.” West ducked his head to hide his smirk. “Poor buggers. The socialists invite them in and we capitalise on them. If only they knew.”

“The socialists have a narrow view of life.” Armitage raised his eyebrows. “They are easily manipulated, that’s why socialism uses them. Their leaders will never realise that all they’ve done is point out who can be manipulated.”

“Yeah, yeah, we’re not here for politics. This is far more important, it’s about money.” West waved his hand. “Next, Armitage, you call for volunteers as usual. You’re looking for carriers, of course, asymptomatic infectors, as always. The ones who get sick, cure them, send them home with a fat wad of cash. The ones who don’t but who are infectious, you ‘cure’ with a placebo and let them loose. The big payoff means you’ll get volunteers from all over the country so you get the best spread.”

“Works every time.” Smythe looked up from his notes. “It spreads, maybe a dozen or more get infected and then millions come looking for a vaccine.”

“All helped by the hysterical press. What would we do without them?” Armitage clasped his hands.

West laughed before speaking. “The tinfoil hat lot will be on about population reduction and saving the planet from humanity again. Every time. They can’t seem to grasp that we don’t give a shit about any of that. We just want the money.”

“It’s almost too easy. We use the same techniques over and over and nobody notices,” Armitage said. “But then antismokers, antibooze, anti salt, sugar, all of them use the same methods and nobody’s noticed that either.”

“People are dim.” West leaned back in his chair. “Most just want an easy life, no challenges, no hard parts. Offer to take the hard parts away and they’ll come running.” He stood. “Well, I think we have a new project. Let’s get moving and call this meeting closed.”

France has a pro-EU, Brussels puppet as its leader. Well, it’s what they voted for. I don’t know how much real power the French President has – don’t his pronouncements have to go through Parliament? I’ve no idea, perhaps one of the France-occupying readers can tell us. Not our problem, since the UK is now on a no-going-back route out of the EU. We’ve even been deleted from their propaganda leaflets.

At least there aren’t likely to be riots, at least not by the French. It seems clear in modern politics that one side always accepts losing a vote while the other side scream about voting being non-democratic because they didn’t get what they wanted. Then they have protests to overturn the vote in the name of democracy. These are usually violent.

It’s always the same sides too.

It’s rather like the Church of Climatology’s thought process. It gets a little warmer, that’s global warming. It gets unusually cold, ‘weather is not climate’. In the same way, Socialism only recognises democracy if they win the vote.

This kind of doublethink is endemic now.

I bought New Scientist this week. First time for ages. There is a feature article about air pollution. Apparently, at least in the West, it’s not so bad. China, India, Bangladesh… well they are effectively going through their industrial revolution phase and that’s always messy. The cities in those countries get smog like London used to get. Pretty pointless pushing to ban smoking there – but they do anyway.

The article carries a chart showing causes of death. Predictably, smoking is near the top. What’s interesting is that nowadays, nobody just dies any more. Everyone dies of something that could have been prevented if only the NHS could force them to live pure lives. It seems based on the premise that if we remove all risks from life, nobody will ever die again. Except… of boredom.

While the article shows a rapid fall in air pollution in the UK, the editorial laments the UK government’s failure to tackle air pollution. It’s headed with a picture of a smoggy street which is quite clearly not in the UK. The cars are on the wrong side of the road and the no-parking lines are red, not yellow. They didn’t even bother to spend five minutes with Photoshop to make it half-convincing. What really hurts is that PhD level scientists will read that crap and not question it.

The editorial calls for some kind of legally-enforced action from the government while the article claims all major atmospheric pollutants are in decline in the UK’s air.

I don’t mean the smoke from half a gram of burning leaves. I mean properly toxic stuff. The UK’s air is getting cleaner. Remember that when the new anti-motorist regulations come into force so that the Green Men can breathe pure air in the cities. I’m glad I don’t live in one.

We now have the latest big push from antismoking to classify vaping as smoking. It’s clearly not smoking. For one thing there’s no smoke. No tobacco either. It’s getting to where rechargeable batteries and USB connectors are likely to be classified as tobacco products – and politicians all over the world can’t seem to understand why they are now openly ridiculed. If there is one thing more likely to see you more universally despised than being a smoker, it’s becoming a politician.

The antismokers say they want us to stop smoking but only using their approved methods. You know, the ones they get paid to push. Not some independent method that’s been shown to work for an awful lot of people, oh no, can’t have that.

“Nicotine is ‘addictive and deadly’. To help you escape its clutches we’ll sell you patches and gum loaded with… nicotine.”

What they really want is to get you ‘addicted’ to their own nicotine delivery method, so they can cash in.

Warnings on cigarettes, warnings about the alleged addictiveness of nicotine on vaping gear… seen any warnings on the patches and gum? Of course not. Seen any public shouting about people under 18 getting hold of patches and gum? Neither have I.

Approved nicotine is magically safe to prescribe. Non-approved nicotine is deadly and will kill you along with everyone in a 100-metre radius. Every time a smoker lights up in public we are like slow motion suicide bombers. That is what modern medicine, and our Governments, actually believe.

Really. They genuinely believe it. In the old days, schools used to teach chemistry and anyone from those days will have no trouble finding the chemical structure of nicotine. It’s a simple molecule. The nicotine in patches is the same as the nicotine in tobacco. The same as the nicotine in vape steam.

I’m still amazed no doctor has been charged with attempted murder for prescribing nicotine patches after telling us it’s deadly and addictive. Why hasn’t that happened? It’s wide open, that goal.

You know, some vapers don’t even have nicotine in their steam. Some have found that it’s the action of smoking they like. The taste, blowing smoke rings, all that stuff. The nicotine isn’t really necessary. I’ve tried it in my own Electrofags. Nicotine isn’t the biggest part of smoking, it’s the taste and the action that matters. That’s why Electrofag has worked for so many people. Not for me, not yet. The strange flavours are a lot of fun but I haven’t found a tobacco flavour that tastes just right. Maybe one day.

It must be difficult to keep a war on smokers and a war on motorists going at the same time. A war on all forms of transport, in fact, other than electric Noddy cars and trains made by Hornby. They have to ramp up the same pretend risks for both wars without anyone questioning how you can die twice. They seem to be managing this quite well because the general public have failed to notice.

There have been several Dalek and other alien invasions of Earth. Remember those? Nobody does, and in subsequent episodes the Doctor puts it down to the human ability to blot out anything that doesn’t fit their worldview.

He’s right. Humanity is easily controlled. Has been easily controlled for a very long time. It’s a herd. The oft-used sheep analogy is not misplaced. Those of us who won’t run with the herd are treated as anomalies and freaks – and perhaps we are. We like it that way.

Some of us will always refuse to obey. Some of us will snarl back at the sheepdogs. Some of us will remember and write it down for the future’s annoying buggers to know they are not alone.